The Clintons Have Lost the Working Class

Bill Clinton was known for channelling working-class pain, but the enthusiasm for Hillary’s candidacy increasingly seems concentrated among affluent, older Democrats.

Photograph by Matt Rourke / AP

Why can’t Hillary Clinton’s campaign get going? By most conventional measures, she had a pretty good week in New Hampshire: a commanding performance in Thursday night’s debate, an emotive one in Wednesday night’s televised town hall. But the scale of her loss to Bernie Sanders was striking, and its* *shape was revealing. Clinton lost among young voters by nearly 6–1, and among independents by 3–1. Most arrestingly, Sanders won voters with an income of less than fifty thousand dollars by 2–1. There’s a lot of talk about Clinton’s campaign repeating the chaos and errors of 2008, but that year she had the white working-class vote. Clinton’s candidacy looks narrower than ever, more confined to those whose experience of life approximates her own. Last night, in New Hampshire, the rare demographic group she won was those with incomes of more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. For now, at least, Clinton has become the wine-track candidate.

During this long New Hampshire week, the Clinton campaign was a mash-up of Democratic Parties past and present. Bill Clinton, once the Party’s great channeller of working-class pain, surfaced, gaunt and joyless and wearing lumberjack red plaid. But his speech on Sunday had little of the old empathy; it was just a nasty blast at Sanders, whom the ex-President* *called* *“hermetically sealed” from reality. Careening across southeastern New Hampshire yesterday, I noticed that the polling places were thick with Clinton signs, many advertising her endorsement by a plumbers’ and pipe fitters’ union. At Oyster River High School, in Durham, near the University of New Hampshire, some of the union men were out in person. The institutional Party—the unions, the elected officials—was doing what it could for her. It didn’t seem to make much difference. Heading in to vote, past the union men, was a steady stream of state-school students.

Like everything else in New Hampshire, the working class here is distinct: less diverse than in the rest of the country, and less organized. Certainly, Clinton’s strong support from political organizations in minority communities will help in other states, though black and Latino Americans have, on the whole, grown more receptive to radical perspectives, not less. Perhaps more striking, union organizers have already been expressing worry about sympathy for the Trump campaign within their ranks. Those organizers themselves are likely to be sympathetic to Sanders, whose politics more closely match their own. Perhaps residual working-class loyalties, and her own strengths, will be enough to carry Clinton through the primaries. But the enthusiasm for her candidacy increasingly seems concentrated among affluent, older voters who are already committed members of the Democratic Party. That is not the most promising platform from which to begin a general-election campaign in any year, and especially not in a vigorously populist one.

“I know I have some work to do, particularly among young people,” Clinton* *said* *last night. Others have emphasized the large margins that Sanders has won among young women. But, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the trouble seemed broader than that: it ran through all of those people who have not yet made it. During the nineteen-nineties, the Clinton coalition ran along aspirational lines, drawing a hard line between virtuous workers and welfare recipients, and between hard-working professionals and capitalists, to summon the upwardly mobile. But the revelations of inequality have meant that aspirational talk has fallen flat, and the experience of 2008 has fractured faith in established leaders to fix it. This primary was held in a white and comparatively wealthy state in a generally prosperous time. Compare Sanders’s winning speeches to Clinton’s losing ones this week, and it appears that middle-class voters are simply more willing to see themselves as stuck in place than they have been for a very long time. That aspirational vein is hard to find.

On yesterday’s “Morning Joe,” Donald Trump was asked what the voters who supported him wanted. “Security,” he said. He talked mostly about physical security (the border, ISIS), but he also mentioned health care and trade. “We’re going to take care of people dying on the street,” Trump* *said* *in the New Hampshire debate, and that full notion of social security has become more explicit in the billionaire’s talk lately. This security is what Clinton has been promising for her entire political career, and at times last night she gestured in that direction: “It isn’t right that the kids I met in Flint on Sunday were poisoned because their governor wanted to save money,” she said. But she also conjured images from the nineties that seem less vivid: of “ladders of opportunity” and the need to “unleash, again, the innovation of our entrepreneurs.” The irony for Hillary Clinton is that she needs some of Bill’s voters, the beer track. But the solution probably isn’t Bill’s politics, and it probably isn’t Bill himself, either.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.